NTFS on Linux

2008 Nov 9 at 03:06 » Tagged as :virtualization, python,

It's been a long long time since I last created an NTFS partition.  Just created one - but windows is no where in site. The partition was created with cfdisk as usually and formatted with mkfs.ntfs - how easy things have become. I remember struggling a long time ago to mount NTFS partitions while using Redhat. The Redhat kernel didn't support NTFS and you had to compile it by hand, even then it was read only and sometime prone to error.

We have come a long way since then. Even so I was a wee bit worried about using NTFS (specially since I often fall victim to hard drive failures). So instead of partitioning a real drive I used a disk image. mkfs.ntfs was run inside a Qemu guest.

The disk on that particular guest (Fedora 9) was used up. Fedora says 4 GB is all that is needed for the install, well even without installing KDE, i have only about 300MB left on it. Had I installed KDE also , the full 4GB would have been used up. Increasing the size of a new partition is a tedious process. So I thought I would add a second disk (virtual of course) and move usr onto it. Heck I must be the only guy in the world to have his /usr on an NTFS partition.